Vintage rock

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They may not be willing to put up with the shenanigans of a
Homebake, but older music fans still want their big days out.
Bernard Zuel reports on the trend that's making wineries sing.

It used to be said that the attraction, or at least incidence,
of sex and drugs and rock'n'roll tended to fade in middle age. You
hit your mid-30s and sex would be monthly, drugs would be Panadols
and rock'n'roll would be a dim memory of an outdoor festival or a
golden oldies radio station. Not any more.

The image of the typical summer rock festival is that of a Big
Day Out, with its rock and dance mix; the recently staged Homebake,
with its all-Australian line-up; and the beach-side electronica
gathering, Good Vibrations. For these extravaganzas, the teen and
young adult market has been lining up for months to buy tickets,
prepared to stand in the baking sun for up to 12 hours and eat the
kind of food usually used in a laboratory experiment.

Very few people over the age of 25 or 30 are prepared to put up
with that, so theoretically their days of rock festivals should be
over. But now there are outdoor concerts and festivals aimed at
consumers not just old enough to drive, but old enough to have a
couple of cars in the garage.

These are festivals where you can sit down when you want to,
drink alcohol (without needing ID) from a glass, not a plastic cup,
and eat real food - either your own or made by a caterer who can do
more than deep fry. They're festivals held not in open city spaces
and showgrounds, but in wineries where you might see Jamie Cullum,
Norah Jones, Elvis Costello, Pete Murray or Bryan Adams. They're
festivals like A Day on the Green.

A Day on the Green was started four years ago by Michael and
Anthea Newton with a one-off show on Victoria's Mornington
Peninsula and has spread to wineries in the Hunter Valley, the
South Coast, Mudgee and South Australia's Clare Valley. From
October to April, concerts are held in natural amphitheatres at a
winery and are limited to fewer than 5000 people. Typically, they
feature four or five acts over five or six hours.

The audience is 35- to 50-year-olds, many of them couples,
paying from $100 to $400. In the 2003-04 season, the small Day on
the Green operation, which has fewer than a dozen staff and
operates for only half a year, grossed $4 million. This season,
there are eight additional shows, all of them sell-outs.

Not surprisingly, these festivals have become the kind of
success story that inspires both envy and imitators. Later this
month, for example, another promoter is bringing swing/pop singer
Harry Connick jnr to perform at a Hunter Valley winery not far from
a regular Day on the Green site.

It sounds simple now but, while more genteel jazz and classical
concerts in wineries had worked before, five years ago no one
thought you could do the same with rock and pop shows.

"When I was a [booking] agent, some of the artists I represented
appealed to a slightly older demographic and it was always the same
gigs they were doing," Michael Newton says. "They could never get
on the Big Day Out [line-up] or Homebake or things like that, so
from an artist's perspective there was [the question of] how can
they present themselves to the audience. I was also getting on a
bit and thought [apart from] Byron Bay Blues Festival there was
nothing for an older, 25-and-over market that was like a festival.
Just because you get older doesn't mean you don't like music."

But do people want to attend rock festivals any more? Don't they
prefer to stay home and watch a DVD on a widescreen TV with
surround sound?

"Look at what the Eagles have done, it proves that there are
people with disposable income that want to go to shows," Newton
says, referring to the recent national tour by the California
country-rockers. In Sydney, they played to 60,000 people, some of
whom had paid $400 or more for tickets and who probably account for
the phenomenal sales of Hell Freezes Over, the Eagles'
live DVD which has topped the DVD sales charts for months.

"These people don't want to go to pubs and clubs anymore,"
Newton says. "I think they haven't been given the right options to
go to shows. On our bills, it's three or four bands, like it used
to be in the pubs, and we've taken the old pub touring thing that a
rock act used to do and put the concept into a winery."

Newton admits he and Anthea have created a festival for people
like themselves - couples who are in their early 40s and have a
couple of kids, but who still happen to like music.

It's a similar scenario at the Cockatoo Island Festival, which
will spread over the Sydney Harbour island for three days at
Easter. Festival director Brandon Saul says the brief - to cater
for teenagers, young adults and couples with children - suits him
perfectly.

"I'm only 35 and I wouldn't have the stamina for a week at
Homebake, but at a three-day festival on the harbour, there'll be
light and shade in the mix," Saul says. "The main stage operates
between 2.30 and 6pm, so if you want to see Gomez, for example, you
can do that and be back in Sydney for dinner, if you wish. At a
really selfish level, this is a festival for me."

Saul began the Byron Bay Arts Festival when he was 23, designing
it to satisfy his needs at the time. Now, he says, "I have a
daughter and twins on the way, I like a lot of music and I like
events, but I'm not prepared to stand knee-deep in mud anywhere to
do it. And I do want a seat between gigs [and to] have something
nice to eat."

Like Newton, who believed a left-field choice such as Elvis
Costello would still appeal (and was proved right), Saul says the
desire for comfort does not automatically mean comfortable taste in
music. As he hopes the Cockatoo Island festival will show. "I find
it frustrating that music presented for slightly older people is a
little gentrified," he says. "I think it's important to note that
people who are a little older still have an interest in hip-hop,
dance music, right through to John Lee Hooker or Gomez. Most people
have broader taste than a market economy wants them to have."

A Day on the Green's next show, an all-Australian line-up of
Pete Murray, the Waifs, Tim Rogers and Clare Bowditch, supports
that conviction. "It's selling through the roof, probably our
strongest show ever on pre-sale apart from maybe Norah Jones,"
Newton says.

The promoters aren't the only ones making money out of these
festivals. The regions hosting the winery shows have found them a
fillip, economically and socially.

"It's not just about going to a concert; it's about experiencing
the vineyards and the golf courses and all of those other
facilities that are there," Thornton says. "Because of the
proximity to Sydney, people are having a good weekend away. The
people, I guess, with the higher disposable income, enjoy a weekend
like that and in quite a lot of instances they're taking the
kids."

Andrew Fletcher, CEO of Hunter Tourism, estimates the concerts
have drawn an extra 50,000 visitors to the Hunter in the extended
summer season.

Newton is equally pleased with the results. "The tourism people
have told us that on average per person going to the show, taking
out some of the locals ... about $250 per person is being injected
into the local economy that day, apart from the tickets," he says.
"We've had letters from councils saying this was the biggest day of
trading in the region, bar none. We got in a cab at Mudgee airport
and got talking to the cab driver and he wouldn't let us pay for
the fare because he said 'you guys are making me money'."

A Day on the Green has had a big effect on Mudgee. "It increases
visitations substantially," says Brian Hardiman, CEO of Mudgee
Gulgong Tourism. "[In 2003, A Day on the Green] probably returned
between $500,000 and $600,000 to the town in actual financial
returns, but it also increased the exposure to people who might not
have thought about visiting Mudgee."

Mudgee has long hosted the Huntington Music Festival but while
Huntington has a select clientele, A Day on the Green has more mass
market appeal and "it is music for big kids", Hardiman says with a
laugh.

Those big kids have been beside themselves since it was
announced Canadian rocker Bryan Adams would perform in Mudgee in
March and 5000 visitors are expected to turn up.

The crowds are coming, the promoters are happy, the tourism
people are ecstatic. But what about the artists? It seems they're
enjoying the trend, too.

Elvis Costello said his November tour, which included theatre
shows as well as winery gigs, had been his favourite tour of
Australia since his first visit here in 1978.

Stephen Cummings - who, along with Joe Camilleri, Michael Thomas
and Diesel, toured with Costello last year - is equally enamoured
of the concept. For him, it's a chance to play to audiences who
can't see him on TV or hear him on radio because it's assumed, by
the wise heads in broadcasting, that no one over 25 is interested
in music any more.

"The proof in the pudding is I sold over 500 CDs at the gig and
this has been my best-selling record in 10 years [with sales of
8000]," Cummings says. "It was definitely a worthwhile thing to
do."